Part of the argument for dropping the SAT is that the SAT has been shown to be a proxy for family socio-economic status and is no better an indicator of success at college than GPA, honor/AP/IB course participation, and extracurriculars.
(I’m not making that argument myself, I haven’t seen numbers explained well enough to form a solid opinion)
> SAT has been shown to be a proxy for family socio-economic status
The problem is that this argument is in isolation. If SAT is a proxy, how much better are the other activities as proxies? Who has the leisure to participate all those sports clubs, volunteer clubs, writing all kinds of fancy essays? While the poor kids struggle with jobs outside the school work to support the family and are perpetual tired? If u get rid of the SAT score, who are supporting these poor kids?
I don't believe the people who is making the argument didn't know this. I firmly believe that they are bad faithed and hope others can't see through the crack of the logic and eat it up. Who benefit from this kind of policy which favors the kids with 'life fulfilling' resumes? Plus AA, you know fully well who are benefiting (hint, not the poor kids).
GPA is utter horse hockey, at least in the high schools I grew up around. Grade inflation is so rampant in some schools that 80+% of students have an A or better average. Our valedictorian took classes like "Honors Ag[riculture]" that were trivial, but were graded on a 110 point scale. She also cried to the teacher in front of the class after every single assignment she made less than an A+ on and sent her mom in to cry if that didn't work. IMO GPA is one of the most hackable metrics and should play absolutely no part in college admissions.
There are a lot of issues with this argument which any administrator should immediately see the issue with.
GPA: Schools weigh GPA differently. One thing I saw was that some schools with honors / AP you can get above a 4.0 to the point of a 5/4. Also GPA can be messed up when someone has a bad home life, or works a job.
honors/ap/ib: These are often related to which school you go to. Poor schools have few to no AP classes available. My school had 2 AP courses available, 0 IB. I was shocked when I went to college and talked to people that had 10 or 20 AP classes. Sure anyone can just take the AP exam, but I didn't know that at the time.
Extracurriculars: Bad and poor schools have fewer extracurriculars.
When you compare good schools (which are in wealthier more exclusive neighborhoods) with bad schools, not even accounting for private schools, its absolutely astounding the differences.
College admissions teams don't accept the GPA from each school as-is. Instead, they look at the difficulty of each course, the school and their knowledge of the students from that school in past years. They actually use their own formulas and recalculate an internal GPA that is specific to that college admissions team. For example, they may only consider core classes and ignore electives. They may or may not count AP courses as part of their formula. In the end, each college makes their own rules about what criteria they will use to compare students.
Yes, but selective colleges have relatively little experience with each school's grading distributions and are not permitted to systematically share data with each other because of antitrust/collusion concerns.
Almost everything colleges use to admit students is a proxy for socioeconomic status. Some things, like extracurriculars, could be far more correlated to SES. The only exception would be when a student gets points for being from a race or neighborhood that tends to be less affluent.
Which raises the question: why single out the SAT?
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
SAT is a rugged system that performs well while withstanding concerted efforts by hackers to undermine it. Replacing it with systems that perform no better (when not under anywhere near as much fire, and appearing to have no real security) is probably not going to work so well.
It doesn't matter what the numbers show on that, because it's a strawman argument. Most people promoting the preservation of the SAT, (certainly the OP by implication of his comments) is that a high score on it is a sufficient metric for college aptitude, which has a low cost barrier of entry for the poor but intellectually gifted. The people who look to do away with it seem to wrongly assume that the former group are all saying a high score should be a necessary condition for a competitive applicant.
You can watch SAT prep videos and pirate prep books for free. GPA gets juiced all the time. Honor AP/IB had a solid premium. Very few extra curriculars that don't cost money / resources.
The handful of kids (including me) that didn't pay 5 digits for fancy SAT prep at my school poured over some study guides and watched pirated VCDs and ended up doing better than kids who half hearted their private prep.
You don't even need to do that. There are plenty of free, legally accessible resources to prepare for the test available now- much more so than when I took the tests back in my youth.
The problem of SAT is that it's too easy, or at least too easy to be gamed by tutoring. That is, family with means can really improve their kids' scores by throwing money. Make SAT as challenging as India's JEE or those national entrance exams in East Asian countries, and we will see that tutoring hardly will matter in large scale but teacher's quality will do.
> Are you saying that students with money to spend on tutors don't do better at the JEE or Chinese entrance exams?
Some will do, for sure. However, when tests are challenging enough, teachers and talent become dominating factors. Good teachers make sure that students work hard and have access to illuminating exercises to realize their full potential, and students with insufficient talent will not excel in those tests no matter how much tutoring they have. After all, tutoring is not education. Of course, I may have been biased per my own observation: the distribution of student performance in my schools hardly changed due to tutoring because my teachers simply gave challenging enough homework and exams, which did a good enough job to remove the advantages of tutoring, if there's any. Using an extreme example: yes you can find the best coach for you to prepare Math Olympiad, but you'd be able to cross a threshold first before you can even understand what the coach talks about. Similarly on the level of JEE or national entrance exams, I may spend 10 times as much time memorizing some patterns while my classmates whoop my ass by simply attending classes -- this is also why I think the progressives are doing a deservice to poor kids or minority groups. They could've raise standards and build better public schools to help the talented stand out, yet they choose to lower standards and really damage the perception on the otherwise truly talented group.
In india due to less resources for the poor compared to the rich, the government has 'reservations' for the economically weaker section, i.e. at least X percent of the students who will be given admission will be from economically weaker sections.
On the negative side, we also have reservations depending on your caste, so whether or not you get admission into a prestigious institute depends on your family history.
On an orthogonal note, harder tests are more sensitive. In a test as easy as the SAT you would expect most of the bright kids to have the same score regardless of whether they are top 10% or top 1%.
With a harder test like the JEE, we can separate these two outcomes
It's not that harder tests in general are more sensitive, it's just if your test score saturate at either endpoint, they are not sensitive at that endpoint
> no better an indicator of success at college than GPA, honor/AP/IB course participation, and extracurriculars
It's no better than each of these, but it improves the prediction when combined with them.
But worse, those other things: GPA, AP course participation, impressive extracurriculars--- are far more receptive to being "bought" than a good SAT score. Being on a travel sports team, or having leisure / advice to do "impressive" volunteering, or having systemic tutoring support... do much more to move these other metrics than you can move SAT with any amount of prep.
If it were a proxy for socio-economic status, there would have to be some way for the score to adjust if the student's parents suddenly went broke.
Since there isn't it cannot be a proxy.
Perhaps you meant it correlates? So what? What if it correlates better with success in college than pure socioeconomic status, which I'm fairly sure it does?
(I’m not making that argument myself, I haven’t seen numbers explained well enough to form a solid opinion)